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Teacher conferences were held at my daughter’s kindergarten today (she’s way behind on her calculus homework!) Afterwards I was putting some of her paperwork away and came upon the “graduation day” wishes from her pre-school teachers this past June.

Wishes played a central role in the work they did over the past year. The header for my site is a picture of jars filled with different types of wishes they found in the forest. The wishes the teachers shared really touched me then and inspired me again today, so I wanted to share them with you all.

We wish that you will always look and listen closely with your heart to the world around you and take care of it. We know that you are full of wisdom and imagination and that listening and relationships are at the heart of all you do. We wish for you so many wishes!

We wish that you will forever notice details and discover the ways things work

We hope you make new friends while cherishing those you already love.

We wish that you will forever see new ways of doing things – imagine and create new ideas and test them to see if they work.

We hope that you will always laugh a lot and know how good it feels to sing and dance.

We hope that passionate concentration for what you love always makes you happy.

We wish for you endless opportunities and connections….and of course for lots of your wishes to come true.

What have you wished for recently? I wish for you each to take a moment today and wish something inspiring for yourselves or the people you love!

If you’re a fan of content marketing, then you are probaly in awe of all the infographics, corporate journalism and general social goodness coming from Mindjet. Over the past few months together with Jess3 they’ve had an on-going series called “Between Minds: An Ongoing Taxonomy of Team Dynamics”. They have highlighted optimists vs. pessimists, left-brained vs. right-brained and my favorite - thought leaders vs. do leaders.

When they released their latest post “East Coast vs. West Coast: Bridging to the Coastal Divide” for the first time I wasn’t quickly and clearly on one side. I was born and raised in New England, of course I might still say “wicked” and eat grinders, but my career began in Los Angeles at the start of the 90′s dot-com boom. How would I choose?

After quite the spirited debate among my coworkers, conclusion was I am an East Coaster in business with some West Coast consensus skills and in my personal life I am West Coast laid back with some East Coast-in-your-faceness. Frankly, I don’t think of it as having 2 distinct parts, so guess I’ve got that work/life integration worked out well. If you believe differently, you should know I was tagged near fisticuffs in the original post below. Guess I might be a bit more East Coast huh?

If you have read any social business articles, whitepapers or blogs lately you probably read that you need to have a plan, deploy the technology and engage the users. Such advice barely scratches the surface.

It fails to advise how to plan, how to deploy and how to engage. It is like describing the ingredients to a gourmet dessert but failing to explain how to make a mousse.

What guides successful planning, deployment and engagement is something much fuzzier and difficult to nail down: empathy.

Last week I was thrilled to see the latest social stat from Dan Zarrella on How to Get More Clicks on Twitter. Always looking for ways to increase my reach I have been testing some new tools both from a queue/timing perspective as well as digging into the analytics specific to my follower base. I was interested to see after bumping Dan’s stats up again my actual performance that while many of the best times to tweet were similar, my best reach came at slightly different time because of when my audience was online.

The most amount of my followers are online Monday and Thursday at 10am PST (denoted below by the black dots)

While online time did impact reach a bit, the majority of my replies and RT’s came at different hours. Monday at 10am – no replies or RT even though most of my followers are online, ditto with Thursday. Wednesday between 12-2pm was the best and look at the weekend Fri-Sun – 6pm to Midnight were the hot times.

More Valuable Replies, RT’s or CTR?
When looking at Twitter performance I’m looking not only at the replies and RT’s but also who clicked through on the links. Below is the previous weeks click-data while Wednesday was the best day for replies and RT’s it was one of the lowest for click-throughs, the weekends again killed it for CTR. While Sunday is one of the lowest days for audience online, it tends to be the audience that RT’s and clicks on my links the most.

What is Next?
My best times are determined by two key measures: the performance of past tweets and when most of my followers will be online. I’ll be changing some of the buffering tools I use to tweet armed with this new data and see if I can get my replies or retweets to increase. I look at this data weekly to see how changes in schedule do or don’t impact reach and response.

At the conclusion of the recent New York City Digital Collective, PepsiCo’s Bonin Bough – Global Director of Digital & Social Media and the other hosts closed the day with a recap of the biggest issues the group shared they will be facing in 2012.

1. How do we “talk digital” with the C-Suite? How do we help them have a better user understanding of today’s platforms, devices, and services?
2. How do we find the right talent?
3. How are we keeping open communication between digital teams and business teams?
4. What do we do when guidelines and restrictions are slowing down processes? (How do we build trust?)
5. How do we go from innovation to experimentation?
6. How do we make sure advice from both inside and outside the organization is equally weighted?
7. How do we counter an organization’s cultural fear of innovation?
8. How can we develop better dashboards, so we can see real-time innovation progress?
9. How do we best manage project ownership?
10. How do we continue to put consumers ahead of the brand when planning content and campaigns?